Hunt ghosts on your Nintendo DSi with Ghostwire

No, Virginia, ghosts do not exist. The vomiting of ectoplasm from the nostrils of the Victorian medium is just the day-glo shimmering of blacklit crushed velvet. The sudden slamming of a bathroom door at midnight is not predicated by your apartment’s close proximity to an ancient Indian burial ground, but by a draft.

Physics does not support the mechanism of immaterial poltergeists… and, if it did, Ghostbusters makes clear that their detection would require, at the very least, an EKG meter. The Nintendo DSi? Definitely not powerful enough.

So consider us skeptical of Swedish Developer A Different Game’s capability of channeling the Nintendo DSi into a plausible poltergeist detection device.

The title, called Ghostwire, will let you use the Nintendo DSi’s camera and microphone to hunt ghosts in your real world surrounding through what the developers call “augmented reality gaming.” Once you take a picture and find the ghosts, you will have to figure out why they are haunting your apartment or surroundings in order to free them and help them find peace.

“The Nintendo DSi platform is perfect for this game” says Anders Bergman, lead game designer of Ghostwire. “This allows us to enhance the integrated real-world experience with the combination of camera, microphone and touch screen.”

In short, it’s one of the first DSi-specific games to come down the pipeline, signifying the forced obsolescence of the technologically-similar DS Lite. Still, sounds like a decent enough use of the Nintendo DSi but don’t for a second think this is a plausible replacement for a good, old-fashioned exorcism. Down that path lies pea soup and head spinning.